eugenesis-text

‘We have another base in the Sonic Canyons. It’s far away but it’s our safest bet. We can always radio
Prowl from there.’ He waited for a nod and transformed. ‘We’ll stay off the Scud Run and avoid any more
Quintessons. Just follow me.’
He had waited. Taken back to his old cell, hoisted up and hammered against the wall, held in place
by the same old manacles and bonds, Galvatron had waited for the guards to go and the bars to blur and the
sickness to subside. And then, with a slight downturn of the head, he had mentally activated the transtrigger,
the switch that would prod the morphcore and send complex instructions to a body-wide network
of adaptive circuitry. This would kick-start the transformation program itself, and 8,964 moving parts would
nod and twitch and interact, swapping places, re-anchoring, changing size and shape. The whole process
would be over in little less that 1.3 seconds.
Anyway: he had mentally activated the trans-trigger… and nothing had happened. Nothing except a
nervous jolt of electricity, like a warning sign inside his brain. He tried again and got the same response.
Third attempt. Fourth. Fifth, sixth, seventh… He didn’t know why now should be any different to the
dozens of failed attempts he’d made back in the torture room, but he’d hoped to somehow overcome the
Inhibitor Chip by force of will alone. Frustrated and afraid, he had worked himself into a bouncing ball of
circuitry, determined to break the cycle, to force a different response.
Soon, his every nervecircuit was scrubbed and frayed. Sensing the currents of his mind churn and
boil, sensing encroaching neurological meltdown, he repeated his own name, threading the letters around
his neck, bleeding his fever phonetically. Memories from two lifetimes (and maybe more, for who can say
that parallel selves are mnemonically independent Who can say that 20 years of cross-phasing and bodyswapping
and clone-killing does not blur the boundaries between the ‘phasers, the ‘swappers, the ‘killers)
were meshed into a sprawling retrospective. Previous summits of pain – his mindmerge with Straxus, his
dismemberment on Hydrus 4, his transfiguration before Unicron – were instantly peaked. Even his
ascension into the Rift, when he was peeled and stripped and deconstructed, when he was rendered
irreducible by the howling force of time – even this paled against the blood-rush of agony he felt now.
‘Galvatron! Galvatron!’
He did not know when (or why) he’d started to shout his own name. He imagined it being yelled
back at him by baying crowds in stadia like Jekka or Xerxes, just like the good old days. The words became
abstract bolts of sound. Buried in the slope of his neck and was Point Zero: the origin of the pain, a
seething core that infected every pore and fibrous sinew.
His limbs felt different, as if they had been dissected and reassembled incorrectly, as if a handful of
joint-pins and motion-bolts had rolled off the table and been forgotten. Internal checks and self-help tests
had reported structural weaknesses, slow reaction times, loss of balance, corrupted depth perception,
lethargy, neuralgia – not to mention the complete loss of morphcore access. The Inhibitor Chip – the IC,
the Inhib, the Chipper – had barricaded throughways and filters.
He would not be beaten by it.
‘GALVATRON!’
He sprung away from the wall and transformed. Lost in a mist of shattered manacles, he remoulded
himself into a barrel-less laser tripod and skidded across the cell. Afraid to move, afraid to recognise his
triumph, he lay in the shadows until the pain – and by the Celestial Spires, by Iacon’s Golden Dome, by the
Prime Program itself, there was pain – had settled. He activated the trans-trigger… and morphed into robot
mode. He rubbed his neck, looking for an entry wound, but the injection had left no mark. The chip was
unreachable; he could not tell whether it was still twitching with life or whether it was now a dried black
scab floating through his neural byways, but at least he was free from its influence. He could think of only
one reason for his ability to defy the Inhibitor Chip: his creation at the hands of Unicron. The Chaos
Bringer had changed more than outward appearance; he had introduced some fiery rogue element into his
sparkline, into his genus mechanica, that made his Vorcode that much harder to crack.
Nevertheless, the Inhib was a formidable weapon, a portable poison from which, it would appear, he
alone was immune. Out of Quintesson hands and into his, it would spearhead a new dark age of mechanical
warfare. He would use it differently from Xenon, of course. He would inject Autobots as they transformed,
paralysing them halfway between humanoid and vehicular forms. He imagined them hanging from meat